Hundreds of Dutch medical records bought for pocket change at flea market

HELLFIRE

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/19/hundreds_of_dutch_medical_records/ –15GB of sensitive files traced back to former software biz
https://www.omroepbrabant.nl/nieuws/4643495/harde-schijven-vol-medische-data-verkocht-op-rommelmarkt

… Robert Polet, a 62-year-old techie and apparent bargain hunter from Breda, a city in the southern part of the Netherlands, inadvertently happened upon a 15GB trove of sensitive medical records after picking up a quintet of 500GB hard drives for €5 ($5.21) each. And where exactly was this cybercriminal goldmine? At a flea market next to Weelde airbase, obviously. [/b] …

Regards

vaxvms

Reminds me of when Best Buy started the Geek Squad. Lots of personal bits shared at flea markets and eBay.

Somewhat-Reticent

A charity that received donated computers & parts assuring donors data would be wiped.
All labels and traces of Microsoft Windows were removed - but not sensitive data files. 🙄

SpHeRe31459

Somewhat-Reticent

Crap like that is why a lot of companies recycle/donate their computers but without drives. They pull the drives and end up physically destroying them because it is considered too risky to leave the drives to a secure handling/erasure process, since human error means it might get missed, etc.
It's kind of a bummer to make so much e-waste, but stories like this are why they end up doing it.

Astyanax

SpHeRe31459

My company won't even let us take home old laser printers. They have those destroyed too. ☹️

Somewhat-Reticent

Astyanax No surprise: many printers archive copied images.

InternetJeff

Astyanax My company won't even let us take home old laser printers. They have those destroyed too. ☹️

Destroyed... like this? 😁

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD2xBXm4y70

/satire

Astyanax

Somewhat-Reticent No surprise: many printers archive copied images.

I could understand those types of printers that had hard drives in them. These didn't and were just run of the mill workstation printers that didn't have any. They worked just fine and we had no grudge against them.

The company just gave us one big all-in-one commercial-grade machine located in the middle of the office instead of the convenient desktop ones everyone could just reach for their own printouts instead of now making us walk across the office now to get. 🙄

Astyanax

InternetJeff

LOL! I remember that scene all too well and have developed similar grudges with certain fax machines in the past.

The printers they wanted to destroy were the common $200 workstation lasers that had no hard drives in them that were still perfectly functional and reliable that we didn't develop any grievance against unlike the movie. 🙂

SpHeRe31459

Astyanax

Oof, that sucks. That's so wasteful to just trash simple printers that didn't have the built-in long-term job storage (a hard drive or flash memory in newer models), so no risk of company info walking away. When companies go that "one big commercial grade copier/printer" route it's usually because some sales person for office equipment told them they can control their toner costs that way, and then offered them a (lucrative for the office equipment company) long term lease of the equipment with built-in service contracts for replacing supplies and repairs.